PlayBook Questions Overshadow RIM's Record Shipments

Research in Motion said late Thursday that the company recorded higher profits and revenue, as well as record BlackBerry smartphone shipments. Executives also confirmed the eventual intersection of PlayBook's QNX OS and the BlackBerry.

Research in Motion said late Thursday that the company recorded higher profits and revenue, as well as record BlackBerry smartphone shipments.

RIM recorded net income of $911.1 million on revenue of $5.5 billion, a 44 percent increase in net income versus a year ago, and a 40 percent boost in revenue.

The company also reported record BlackBerry smartphone shipments of 14.2 million units, a 40 percent increase.

RIM projected fourth-quarter revenue will be between $5.5 billion and $5.7 billion. Those numbers will not include revenue for the PlayBook, a tablet that will rival the Samsung Galaxy Tab and the Apple iPad. But RIM has frustrated reviewers by not allowing any hands-on evaluations of the tablet before its launch in early 2011.

Initial PlayBook sales will be heavily weighted to the enterprise, rather than the consumer focus that the PlayBook's rivals have taken. RIM executives said that enterprise customers have liked the tablet's ability to mirror the corporate desktop, use Flash-based corporate apps, and maintain POSIX compliance.

So, I've talked a lot of Fortune 500 CIOs. It's been uniform, uniform interest," Jim Balsillie, co-chief executive officer of RIM, said in a conference call, according to Seeking Alpha. "Enterprise grade is the real big, big thing, because they live in a world of asymmetrical consequences, where if everything works fine, then everybody pats themselves on a back, but if something goes wrong, often someone in IT pays a pretty severe price. So, they have to be keepers of the system integrity. I think we've really got that figured out in the way we've implemented it.

RIM executives projected that the company would launch a slew of new products in next few quarters, prompting some analysts to question whether RIM was doing too much with too few resources.

But RIM executives also noted that the company has reported record shipments for six straight quarters, and that the late-summer launch of the BlackBerry Torch had exceeded expectations in terms of the number of carriers that RIM had signed on - 75, versus the 50 or so the company was "shooting for," executives said. The BlackBerry Curve 3G also launched with 118 carriers in 48 countries, RIM executives said.

RIM executives also acknowledged again the eventual intersection of the QNX operating system that the PlayBook will run, and the BlackBerry OS.

"Yes, you're going to see BB6 work on QNX," Balsillie said. "So we talked about BlackBerry working on the QNX environment. We haven't given any specific timing or commitments as to what we're going to be doing in future environments, but obviously there's a certain set of performance capabilities in the PlayBook, which are really quite remarkable and you'll see more at CES, and that's got really leapfrogging capabilities.

"So your question is fair one, are we going to put that kind of stuff in the smartphones and we're just not in a position to make specific commitments about what we're going to do there at this time, but you'll just have to stay tuned," Balsillie added. "We're just not talking about our product platform roadmaps for the smartphones ahead of the launches."

Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, president and co-CEO, were also named co-chairmen of the RIM board.

Balsillie was also asked if he expected a lull between the time that the more traditional BlackBerry phones were launched and sold, and the time QNX phones emerge.

"If you saw the roadmap and the launches, there is a great roadmap and there is a whole series of stuff and a lot of it is really locked in with launches and huge desire for it," Balsillie added, noting that carrier billing on its App World was on the roadmap.

"You're going to see a lot of the stuff come out really over the next month," Balsillie said. "So it should be very, very interesting."

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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